At 80, Sheila Hancock is far from slowing down, with daily shows in the West
End, regular exercise – and a first novel to finish

You wouldn’t know it until she opens her mouth, but Sheila Hancock has had a bad day at rehearsals. “It’s the usual nightmare,” she says, looking not the tiniest bit ragged. “I feel unprepared. You think: Why the ---- am I doing this? It’s like childbirth. You forget how painful it is. But in the context of what’s happening in the world, that sounds insane. People are being gassed. So what am I talking about?”

The opening volley has all her trademark qualities – perfectionism, straight-speaking, an off-message attitude to her work, humanitarian concern – and a bit of swearing. She must be a theatre publicist’s unexploded bomb.

“There will be slammed seats,” she warns, “because the language is appalling, but if people stick it out for the first few pages, they will see what it’s about. Despite all the ---- and ----, it is beautifully written.” Hancock plays the matriarch in Barking in Essex, Clive Exton’s comedy about a dysfunctional crime family, alongside Lee Evans and Keeley Hawes. It may be her last stage performance. Not because, at 80, she thinks she’s too old for demanding roles, but because time is running out and she wants to get on with the final edit of her novel, a story of the human consequences of war, covering roughly her own lifespan. “First novel at my age. Can you believe it?”

Until January, she will be working, every night, plus a midweek matinée. “I keep fit, go for a swim, go walking, all to preserve my strength for the wretched show. For four months, I can’t do anything else. I’ve not got that many years left. Do I want to spend four precious months like this?”

Probably, yes. For all her protestations that acting is just a job (“Oh, for Christ’s sake, enjoy it? It’s what I do to pay the bills”), she is a thespian through and through. Glorious roles have been hers since she forced herself back on stage after the intense grief of losing her husband, John Thaw. She has also presented documentaries on art, poetry, the Suffragettes and the Brontës. Now, a new writing career.

No one is more surprised than she is. “I left school at 15 and didn’t go to university, and I thought people like me couldn’t write. Posh people write. When I was young, in comedy, before Dawn French and all the lovely girls, you just didn’t. You did what the boys gave you. The sitcoms and all that stuff. Now I’m in a position to pick and choose a little bit, but at one time I did a load of rubbish because I needed the money. I haven’t been privileged to always be with the RSC or the National or lovely things like that. I haven’t been asked.”

Hypnotherapy helps her conquer stage fright. Mental exercise – learning poems and doing crossword puzzles – keeps her line-learning mind sharp. “I have more of a sense of proportion now,” she says. “If I have a bad day, like today, I think: C’mon, this is just a play. It’s unimportant in the great scheme of things. That comes with age. My life doesn’t stop with the rehearsal any more. It’s not my whole world.”

She sits ramrod straight, a picture of ageless, unaffected glamour in a long striped skirt, pumps and a little navy cardigan wrap. Until recently, she was driving a Jag but she has swapped it for a two-seater Mini Cooper S, “less ostentatious in a time of austerity”. Nothing about this woman is 80 except her lack of inhibition: there isn’t time to beat about the bush. “I’m hungry because I know my life is limited. I don’t muck about.”

It’s rare to find someone so devoid of sentimentality but with so much natural empathy. This morning, on the radio news, she heard a recording of an American woman bravely talking a gunman out of shooting at a school while waiting for the emergency services, and she marvelled at how “ordinary people are capable of the most heroic acts”. She listened to a tree surgeon, a lover of nature and the outdoors, counting his blessings even though he was paralysed after a fall, and she wept.

She’s drawn to charitable causes that help disadvantaged young people because she sees in them what “kids like John and me”, both from working-class families, might have been. “Too many children are left behind in our society. You can’t go on leaving children behind, because that’s where trouble lies. I have met some rough types in my life, but never anybody who doesn’t have a grain of something wonderful in them if it’s developed. If you get them early, you can change lives.”

Care of the dying is another passionate crusade. She has opened two dementia wards – one run by Quakers in a psychiatric hospital in York, another in Portsmouth where, until recently, she was an innovative chancellor of the university.

“I feel strongly that terminal care should be mandatory for every nurse and doctor,” she says. “People are still dying badly.”

A Quaker and a pacifist, she is appalled both at the human cost of civil war in Syria and at the prospect [imminent when we met] of military intervention there. “Why,” she asks, “didn’t we know Assad was an arsehole from way back? Or Saddam Hussein? We negotiated with them.”

Letters are still piling in from readers who are moved by her unintended “textbook on grief”, The Two of Us. Its life-affirming sequel, Just Me, in which she learns to be alone, self-reliant and adventurous, was also a bestseller.

“For The Two of Us, I used my diaries, doctored a bit, even though they were so raw and angry, because I thought if I wrote it nicely, it wouldn’t be as honest as what I splurged out at the time. I think that’s what people who are distressed recognise. I often say to them: write it down and then burn it if necessary.” (To avoid hurt and conflict in the family, she has since burnt her own diaries.)

“Judging by their letters, some people are happy to live with their memories, stay in the same house, keep everything as it was, the clothes around, the smell of the person, all that. That’s absolutely valid. But for me, eventually I had to move on, create a life. If I’m lucky enough to be alive, I thought, I’ve got to do something with it.”

She was never happy with the tragic-widow role. Her friend, Sandi Toksvig, does a good impression of people who approach Hancock with a doleful “How are you?”

“The only answer was: bloody awful,” she says, though she’s too kind to have put it like that. “In the same way, when you are old, people are apt to inquire: 'Are you all right?’ You think: 'Get off!’”

If she ever starts losing her mind, Hancock has naturally made contingency plans. She’ll be straight into a dementia ward. “I’ve told my children I don’t want them near me. I don’t want them to know me like that. I’ll be perfectly all right. And I won’t know them anyway. I don’t want them to suffer that awfulness I’ve had with some of my friends.”

John Thaw died in 2002 of cancer of the oesophagus, as had Hancock’s first husband, Alec Ross. She had coped with both men’s heavy drinking, sometimes to the neglect of the three children – she and Thaw each had a daughter by their first marriages, as well as a daughter together.

Hancock and Thaw had a passionate, turbulent marriage. They split up when she developed breast cancer, but couldn’t bear to be apart for long. “He couldn’t deal with my illness,” she says. “He was terrified of loss; that I would leave him. I did leave. Awful. I understood his attitude at the time, but I was ill. I couldn’t worry about him as well. I had to get myself well for the children while he dealt with his demons.”

One of the reasons she wrote The Two of Us was to tell how this working-class Manchester boy, scarred by his mother’s desertion, had nevertheless risen to the top of his profession.

“It is a tragic story,” she says. “Her leaving did such harm, not only to John but to others who became involved with John. That wound was never healed. You couldn’t talk to him about it.

“Dolly had a huge personality. Sassy, blonde, nice legs. She was quite a girl. She worked as a barmaid but she was trapped on a council estate with two little boys. A spiv came along and lured her. John wouldn’t have liked it, but I wanted to understand her and in the end I did.”

It says everything about Hancock that she bothered to understand – even grew to admire – a woman whose actions had effectively yoked her to a tormented man. “The wonderful thing about her was that although she worked in a pub she never let on that she was John’s mother, even when he was in The Sweeney.”

Hancock seems as wise as she is poised, but insists that age has taught her nothing. “I just know you can survive – if you want to. You can survive or you go under.”